Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Liveblogging from the passport office in Hamilton today, there's something close to 90 people cooling their heels here today. The awesomely efficient staff had 5 wickets open 20 minutes ago, and now that the crowd has swelled they redoubled their efforts and currently have 8 open.

Somebody asked why they didn't go faster if all these people were waiting. I replied that they don't get more money if they do more work.

But maybe I'm just cranky. Must be the waiting. And waiting, and waiting...

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

LeftSpeak is a special language developed by socialists over the years to obscure what they are trying to accomplish and make themselves look like kind, caring, reasonable people. Here is an example from the USA, where they are having a real infestation of socialism lately.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, responded Tuesday to widespread criticism that Democrats only garnered the 60 votes needed to defeat Republican stalling tactics on the health reform bill by catering to self-interest, saying Democrats are focusing on the big picture...

"We have to keep our eyes on what we're trying to do here. We're trying to cross a demarcation line," Harkin told "Early Show" co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez. "On one side is health care as a privilege, on the other side is health care as a right. With these votes, with the vote that we'll take before Christmas, we will cross that line finally and say that health care is a right of all Americans."

The way to understand this is to know that it is exactly, perfectly backwards. In normal English the esteemed Senator means that currently, medical care is a service which can be purchased for money by anyone in the USA. Americans have the right to buy any medical service they can pay for. What his party wants to do is seize control of the medical system, so that Americans can no longer buy what they need or want, they have to take what the government offers them, and they have to pay for it with tax dollars whether they use it or not. If you are privileged, well connected, or just bribe somebody, you will get taken care of. If not, not.

More bluntly, he's lying like a Persian carpet. I don't have the words to express the foulness of his lie. He should be friggin'

Because the truth of the matter is that health care is a service performed by humans who must be paid. Nobody has a right to someone else's labor, only to their own. Well, except in the case of slavery. Russians tried that, it ended badly.

What the Democrats are doing is not changing the nature of health care, they are changing the payment structure. Instead of you paying the doctor directly as in days of yore, and instead of you paying an insurance company to soak up the risk of catastrophic injury, you pay the Democrats. Then they decide what care, if any, you will get. Can you say "death panels"? Sure you can!

In Canada this sleight of hand was accomplished by Pierre Elliot Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada back in the 1970's. It has ruined our health care system and come close to ruining the country. It took the Liberals 30 years to get to the formation of death panels. Which are currently in the planning stage in Ontario, because Ontario is broke, baby. Can't afford to keep Grandma in hip replacements no more, she's had a good life let her go. For real, my friends. Really really.

Watching the Senator and his buddies on Capitol Hill, I suspect that the Liberal Party had smarter, less crooked people in it, and that's really saying something given the crooked, venal, disgusting morons the Liberals are. The Democrats will ruin American health care in less than ten years, I think.

That is what you're in for, proven by recent history in Canada, Great Britain, Europe, Australia, and all of Communism. Or you guys down there could cut them loose, I suppose. Here in Canada doctors and nurses are getting closer and closer to organized civil disobedience, just to keep their heads above water. Something to consider for when the steamroller derby moves to consolidate the House and Senate bills after Christmas. Call your politicians, promise them they will be ejected. Maybe get some recall votes going, unseat the bastards before the election even.

I'd like to see that Tom Harkin guy with his head in a sling, selling pencils on an Iowa street corner by April. Only fair, that's what he's got planned for y'all.

Oh and by the way, if you want health care to be a bit cheaper, two little words for you: tort reform. Cut costs by half in two years, I bet you. Or, you could just make it so the loser's LAWYER pays court costs in any lawsuit. No more slip-and-fall ambulance chasing.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

First my compliments to Kate McMillan, upon whose blog I posted the following comments. Her posting linked here formed the catalyst for my remarks below. Her work on the recent Climategate revelations has been absolutely excellent.

Ahem.

We are presented with an interesting opportunity (again) to observe how our modern culture handles truth. This video presents The Truth, and the data its based on have been known for many years. Watch it and observe that you haven't really learned anything you didn't already know, unless you are a kid in high school. In which case, my condolences.

Ice cores have been getting dug up in the Arctic and Antarctic since a loooong time, probably since the 1950's. I remember these ice age temperature graphics from my dinosaur books as a little kid. I have always known that it has been both -much- hotter and -much- colder right here in Southern Ontario. There are glacial moraines not two miles from here to remind me of both cooling AND warming, as they are formed by glaciers which are retreating. For a more dramatic bit of glaciation, google up the Wisconsin Dells. These facts are verifiable through ice cores, archeology, geology, countless methods to arrive at the same evidence: It has been warmer than today, and the world did not end. It has been colder than today, and the world did not end. You can go see some of the evidence in person, don't even need a shovel.

But over the last 20 to 30 years the entire climate science agenda has been bent on obscuring and denying this reality which we all know. Coincidentally TV became the dominant news platform during that time, and a lot of scholarly specialties have been taken over by post-modern leftists. I watched it happen in Anthropology as a kid, and am watching it happen in medicine presently.

Now, today, we finally have people willing to RE-tell the truth, but not on TV. Coincidentally we have the internet providing another news source independent of TV, radio, newspapers and wire services. Coincidences which I find extremely interesting, to say the least. How many coincidences does it take before one suspects foul play? But that is a different story.

What will be most illuminating is the length of time it takes for decision makers in private industry and government to adjust to this re-revelation of what we all learned at school back in the day.

Cranky reactionary curmudgeons like Rush Limbaugh (and myself, and Kate, and y'all, sorry but that's our role in this narrative) have been raging on since the late 1980's that AGW is a freakin' fairy tale being told by real fairies, but we don't really count. We're just cranky.

What counts is the emergence of the non-cranky, non-conservative "reasonable" people. Meaning mildly left leaning liberal academics who looked at the data and said "Hey, wait a second... WTF is this?" These would be people who woke up one morning and realized that somebody spiked the koolaid they drank in undergrad Climate 101.

Right now we are about five years into the Rise of the Reasonable Climate Skeptics by my fairly sloppy rule of thumb, and the true believers are starting to get upset. Bets are starting to be hedged, Wall Street types are moving money around, the craftier politicians are very quietly making new deals in case the existing AGW deal falls through. How much longer will it take the rats to run off and the AGW ship to sink?

I've been making the prediction that Obama will be the last presidential candidate in the USA to run on AGW/climate change. The problem with that prediction is that it assumes a certain amount of common sense and self preservation on the Left side of the spectrum. This may not be possible for them though, because they have so deeply bought in to the ideological Green movement that they will go down with it. They are in this far, far deeper than they were with gun control in the 1990's and their own people probably won't allow them to escape. I mean, just imagine Nancy Pelosi grabbing on to Climategate Obama (or much more likely his replacement, I don't see Bary getting the Democrat nomination in 2012 after the Hopenchangen FIASCO he just put on) may well be forced by the nutroots of the Democrat party to run on an eco-fiend-ly carbon-tax-em-till-they-bleed platform to Save The World!

Friday, December 11, 2009

Just so we are all perfectly clear where the IPCC and the UN stand on freedom of speech and freedom of the press:

A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him "inconvenient questions" during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Professor Stephen Schneider's assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.

The video is classic. Big gut security boy playing the heavy. Sweet.

The reporter's questions weren't out of line either. "How do you feel about scientists destroying data collected with public money?" "How do you feel about Phil Jones telling people to delete inconvenient emails?"

Just so there's no possible mistake which side of the fight for truth justice and freedom the UN is on, eh?

Police said the gunman got off two shots before his [stolen] weapon jammed while the officer fired four times.

The bullets piercing nearby windows and even a baseball from a gift shop, but amazingly no one else was hurt.

Amazingly, the rat didn't manage to kill anybody else in his suicide-by-cop because he probably held the gun sideways, punk style. The gun he'd never fired before and just assumed would work like in the movies. Thank you Hollywood, for making sure an entire generation of scum can't hit a barn from the inside, and think pieces of junk like the Mac 10 never malfunction. I know that wasn't the Hollywood plan, but thanks anyway. If there are going to be violent criminals, its good that they should be incompetent.

This is the only problem with Rudy Giuliani's Broken Windows policing policy. When you stop busting every single J-walker, double parker, dime bag saleman, graffiti artist and "illegal street peddler" the rats get bolder. Rats never sleep, something Liberals just can't seem to wrap their heads around. You have to keep them scared, or they come out and take over the place. Like during the fabulous reign of NYC mayor David Dinkins when the cops never ever got out of their cars.

Or like right now in Toronto, where they only arrest minorities when they are shop keepers who capture shoplifters.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Yep, Barry's decided the problem with the USA is the scary Republicans and all their scary talk.

Because this here isn't scary at all. "The children who attended Kevin Jennnings’ 2005 GLSEN Conference also left with their own “Little Black Book – Queer in the 21st Century”. One word my friends, watersports. Yes its one word. If you have to look up what it means, you REALLY don't want to know what it means. But Kevin Jennings, watersports expert, is Barry's Safe Schools Czar. That's not scary at all.

And this is cool too. No scariness here. "The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in a way that could hurt business. "

Or this: "President Barack Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" until more Americans are back at work." Because all the spending to date has been working so well!

I could go on (and on... and on...) but it has become obvious by now that the Republicans are out of control! Clearly, any objections MUST be pure partisanship.

Damn Republicans! I hate those bastards.

In other news, sales of guns and ammunition remain brisk across the USA, if down from their record peak a bit. Supply side can't keep up with sales, apparently.